ONLY 2 OUT OF 30 PEOPLE FALSELY ANNOUNCED AS COVID CARRIERS ARE ACTUALLY POSITIVE

 in-cyprus 27 August 2020 - by Annie Charalambous

After a second repeated check on 30 people who on Monday were falsely announced as positive for coronavirus, the Health Ministry announced on Thursday that two are actually carriers of the novel virus.

And that both of them returned from the island of Mykonos on Sunday, August 23.

The 30 cases concerned people who arrived at Paphos airport – 17 came from Mykonos, 10 from the Netherlands, two from the UK and one from Croatia.

On Wednesday, Health Minister Constantinos Ioannou apologised and said a private hospital lab was temporarily suspended from testing for Covid-19 after the extremely embarrassing incident.

He also said that by Wednesday afternoon, 27 of the repeat tests were completed of which only one was found to be positive for the virus.

And that the result of the laboratory test for the other three people was expected within the day.

A preliminary investigation showed that there was contamination during processing of the 30 tests.

The Ministry has also apologised to those affected by the inconvenience and any suffering by those initially deemed positive.

At the same time, affected parties themselves began to suspect something was wrong since Monday morning when they were asked to go through the sampling process again.

In fact, some of them reacted in astonishment when they received the relevant phone call from the Epidemiological Surveillance Unit, accoridng to Philenews.

The Dutch tourists – the majority of whom were transferred to the Eden Resort Rehabilitation Centre in Tersefanou – were especially unhappy.